 |
|
And How to End It
by Brian Clements
Reviewed by SUSAN SMITH NASH
|
When people are convinced they cannot die, they lose the power of distinguishing lies from hope. This haunting line forms the cornerstone of much of what transpires in Brian Clements’ And How To End It. His series of 10 prose poems explore the nature of time and perspective from the point of view of a beginner’s manual of life and death. The starting point is death. Clements is not morbid, and yet the language is shot through with ways to memorialize consciousness of life (and death) through language. To that end, Clements bends words and syntax. Clements shows how poetic language(s) are trapped in the grammars live by. Grammar does not liberate or help create order from chaos. Instead, Clements suggests that the metonymies we employ are now unable to perform what they once were tasked with doing: transcending the “eternal return” in order to snap the individual back into an awareness of responsibility to others. If this life is all we have, we must treat people better. Sartre would agree. To “end it” is a constant preoccupation in world that characterizes by the unendingness of its apocalypses. The “eternal return” characterizes the narratives of literature since the beginning of recorded time. Clements explores the nature of that myth and the “return fatigue” that sets in. He asks a straightforward question: what happens when the narrative of ending and the narrative of eternal return converge? Clements suggests that what happens is the hermeneutical equivalent of the suicide bomber: cashing in one’s chips for the rebirth (the hope? the lie?), and hoping for a definitive ending—with luck, one that ends it all with a flourish. “Political Poem” addresses the dualism inherent in political opinion about change agents of refractory, conflicting facets: Castro and company, etc. “Laboratory Psalm” evokes spirituality moored by wisdom literatures. “Fog” takes the concept of clarity (in language and meaning), and replaces it with a sense of impossibility, and elusive definition. When people are convinced they cannot die.... The line appears again. The reader can’t help but think of 9-11. Clements’ words are a lever; they lift the weight of horror and a memory of what we once considered ineffable (in a negative way), but which now seems annoying, obvious, and uneradicable. “Elegy and Fugue on Voyagers 1 & 2” is a series of flash-thoughts and repeated phrases, which become intimations of immortality in an age when to have such thoughts can be destructive, given the irresponsible ways that booty has been promised to the kids who will blow themselves up. The series of poems adjures the reader to think. |
 Brian Clements is the author of several collections of poetry, including And How to End It, Disappointed Psalms and Essays Against Ruin. Clements is also editor of the independent, non-profit press Firewheel Editions and of Firewheel’s flagship publication, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. He is Professor of Writing, Linguistics, and Creative Process at Western Connecticut State University and Coordinator of WestConn’s MFA in Professional Writing. |